Father's Day

I remember sitting in my third grade desk staring at the teacher who kept smiling at me...I think it was Ms. Haney. She hardly ever smiled. She would look at you through her bug eyed glasses and make you feel shivers down your spine. The class got quiet because we felt impending doom. She stood up and pointed at the door still staring at me and I thought "Oh no! What have I done!" I turned around and there was my father. Tall, handsome in his uniform he held his arms out to me and I all but burst out of that chair. He had been gone for 3 years to Vietnam. Fathers have flaws, they are people like any one else. They make mistakes and as we grow older we realize that we do too. Today I remember that little girl and how her father made her feel. Even though he is gone now I still remember that moment. I love you Daddy years don't change that.

Sappy until the end. (won't change, don't want to)

When J and I first decided to move into "our first apartment" not my apartment or his apartment but our apartment I took a cutting from the Gardenia bush that grew outside. It was four feet wide and almost as tall as me. We almost killed it a number of times in it's pot until years later we decided to plant it in "our back yard at our house. It bloomed today and looks better than it ever has. Love you J here's our first plant together thriving.

 

and now for this mornings blooms!

Life Began in a Garden

As you grow you start rethinking things. I like to think of gardening as an art form. It is painting with plants, therapy with soil! Gardening is a very forgiving medium of art.  You can have failure after failure and begin with a clean canvas every time. Dig it up plant something else, somewhere else. Get plants from all your family and become the historian.  Some people like a garden that's one color and minimum ornamentation, some like masses of color and structures. I happen to like color! ALL of it! I haven't yet met a plant I didn't fall in love with. It adds to your life in so many ways. I have learned to talk to people! Did you know I have not met a gardener who didn't like talking about what they did how they did it? They are the most caring and sharing people I have ever met! Want to start a conversation ask someone about a flower or plant and see their eyes light up!
I have also learned that we need to be good stewards of this small earth. Little things matter! That everything you do has repercussions. Want to teach a child to be responsible? Begin in the garden! 

Getting Wild in the Garden! Cultivation & Cultivars, know your native plants!

My name is Edna and I am a Wild Gardener. 

Wild gardening to me means you mix in as many native plants as you do cultivars. According to Wiki, "a cultivar is a plant or grouping of plants selected for desirable characteristics that can be maintained by propagation." They usually don't belong in the area, humans have replaced native plants with cultivars. Wild gardening is to preserve the native wild landscape and nature. I have golden rod, milkweed and dead nettles growing in my flower beds. The dead nettles are also being used as ground cover and as a natural fertilizer called green manure. {More on green manure later!}

milkweed plants

Make room in your garden for some native species, for those plants that support the natural order around you. Some butterflies and animals have died out because we chose to interrupt nature and plant our own cultivars. They had nowhere to go and nothing they could eat. Most people remember how many butterflies we had in our youth, now they are a rare sight, mostly because we,  in our ignorance, did away with their habitat and food sources by drying up ponds and planting grass. 

Where do you think all the frogs, dragonflies have gone? 

Don't think of native plants and grass as weeds or dry up a natural pond in your yard, embrace the natural surroundings, and find a way to incorporate into your garden.  Natural plants need a place to call home, butterflies need a home to make a family. 
Plant some native milkweed, let the bees have their goldenrod, then lean back and enjoy the sounds of nature. 

{garden photos by me, please share with links}